


Dating and Dancing

by fardareismai



Series: Make The World Better Promo [5]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, prompt fulfilled, slight UA, tumblr prompt fulfilled
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-23 00:22:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9631445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fardareismai/pseuds/fardareismai
Summary: On an ice planet called Woman Wept, Jack hopes he's not going to be thrown off the TARDIS.A Nine x Rose prompt for my Make The World Better Promo from Tumblr.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story is for allons-ymrholmes on Tumblr who donated five trash bags full of clothes to her local women's shelter.
> 
> For her generosity, I have fulfilled the prompt "Nine/Rose taking place on Woman Wept (with the huge beach and the 100 foot tall frozen waves), about their first kiss"

Jack stepped out the front door of the ship and froze.  This was very nearly literally true- it was _cold_ , and what halted the Time Agent in his tracks was the nature of the chill.

It was a bitter, aching, empty cold that Jack had experienced once before.  It was the cold of space- without sun and without atmosphere, but also without any kind of movement, it was an insidious cold that crept into the bones and froze the skin so quickly that you froze to death before you suffocated in the vacuum.

Jack squeezed his gloved right hand into a fist.  He’d lost two fingers the last time he’d felt cold like this- tossed out an airlock after the Captain had caught him poking about both in classified files and the Captain’s companion.  It was only the nanogenes on his own ship that had spared him a jaunty nickname like Jacky Three-Fingers.

He glanced back at the Doctor, still standing in the doorway of his ship, not bothering to look at him, but obviously attuned to his every movement.  Three days on the bus, and Jack’s new captain still didn’t trust him.  He knew he was only there at Rose’s insistence and the Doctor’s sufferance- one toe out of line and even the Doctor’s obvious affection for Rose wouldn’t save Jack.

In truth, though he couldn’t think of what he might have done to have earned it, Jack wondered if this was his last stop- the Doctor had finished with him and was abandoning him here on this tiny dot in deep space to live the last few moments of his life.

He couldn’t decide if it was kindness or cruelty that his final sight in life would be so beautiful.

They stood in the centre of a storm-tossed sea that had been frozen in an instant so the waves rose crystalline white a hundred feet above them, forever in the moment before crashing down on their heads.

“There shouldn’t be any air here,” Jack said carefully, not wanting to accuse, but wanting some warning of whether his death was imminent, the better to face it.

“Don’t worry about it,” the Doctor said gruffly.

Jack opened his mouth to speak again- to tell the Doctor that if he was going to condemn him to death, the least he could do is be honest about it- but closed it again when Rose appeared at the Doctor’s side, wrapped in a warm coat and stepped out onto the ice without fear.

The Doctor might let Jack freeze in the vacuum of space, but he’d never do the same to Rose.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, turning on the spot and Jack couldn’t help but smile.  He’d watched her carefully when he’d first joined the crew, waiting for her ‘wide-eyed girl from the 21st century’ act to break so he could figure her out.  It had never broken, and he was forced to accept just what she was- beautiful, naïve, gentle, foolish, curious, and good.

Jack loved her already, and the Doctor… well the Doctor had known her longer, and had made his position quite clear that first night as trumpets wailed over the speakers in the control room.  

“Where are we?” she asked, glancing between the two men before resting her gaze on the Doctor.

“It’s called Woman Wept,” he said, taking her hand and leading her out farther onto the ice.

Rose turned to look at Jack, gesturing him to walk with them with a bright grin as the Doctor continued speaking to her, before returning her attention to the alien beside her.

Jack kept his distance and only watched the pair.  The Doctor was warning her that she had to stay within a hundred feet of the ship or she’d freeze or suffocate.

“Just me and Jack though?” she said, and Jack could practically see her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth.  “Not you?”

The Doctor chuckled, that low sound rolling and echoing on the glassy walls of the waves around the pair of them.

“Superior Time Lord biology, Rose.”

Jack sighed to himself and turned away from the pair and the way that they seemed practically magnetized to one another, knowing that they wouldn’t notice.

Rose had told him that the Doctor called himself a Time Lord and the bigger-on-the-inside ship gave some credence to the idea, but Jack knew better.  The Time Lords were a myth, not that someone from Rose’s time could know that.  Near-immortal beings with the power to manipulate time and causality, with access to the vortex, the ability to pass through the Void unharmed, and a disdain for lower life forms?

They were more than myths, they were fairy tales.  Tales of angels or monsters told to children of the human diaspora as they went to sleep every night.

“Where’s your boyfriend gotten off to then?”

Jack jumped at the voice that sounded like it was right next to him, though he couldn’t see the speaker.  Some peculiarity of the icy waves had brought the sound to him in crystal clarity.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Rose answered, sounding as though it were something she said regularly.  “I told you, Doctor, he’s like you.”

“Right, now I recall.  Only you said with dating and dancing, so not much like me at all.”

“Enough like you,” she said, and Jack could hear the sly smile in her voice.  “I at least know you dance now.  Or when you’re trying to prove a point to some bloke you do.”

“You know there are feet at the end of my legs anyway, and I’ve an idea how to move them.”

“What else could I possibly mean by ‘dance’?”

Shit, Jack thought, wishing suddenly that the Doctor _had_ only brought him here to die.  The heat suddenly flaring up between the pair of them could melt the entire sea on which they were standing.  He wanted to give them privacy (well, if he were honest, he’d love to watch, but had an idea what the Doctor would say to _that_ idea) but he couldn’t be sure whatever quirk of physics had him able to hear them both wouldn’t work the other way and have them hearing him beating a hasty retreat.  If they did, whatever magic was happening between them would surely shatter.

“You said dating though, and-”

Jack threw his head back, squeezed his eyes shut, and clenched his teeth.  Clearly it wasn’t going to be him that ruined things for the Doctor and Rose, it would be the Doctor himself.

“I just want you to be careful, Rose.  He’s a Time Agent and they’re not to be trusted.”

Jack thought it was quite rich of the Doctor to tell Rose not to trust Jack when he wasn’t even being honest with her about his species.

“You could always call Rickey the Idiot the next time we’re on Earth.”

“You hate Mickey,” Rose said, sounding surprised.

“I don’t hate him.  At least I know he cares about you and would keep you safe.  I can’t trust the Captain for that.  So if you needed to… dance…”

Rose snorted.  Jack could hear it perfectly and was impressed with the acoustics of the area again.  Someone should hold a concert here.

“I’d be better off with you, Doctor.  Mickey don’t dance.”

There was a long moment of quiet between them, during which Jack was afraid to even breathe.

“Dance or… _dance_?”

“I don’t know, Doctor,” Rose said, and there was a hint of sharpness in her voice.  “I suppose it depends on what you mean by _dance_.”

“You know-”

“Actually no, I _don’t_ know.  I don’t know a bloody thing because you never say anything.  I should have realized- of _course_ you dance.  You dance around the truth every time you open your bloody mouth.  You talk and talk and never say _anything_!”

The ice amplified her voice so well that Jack could hear the tears in it, and the tiny gasp of breath there at the end as she held back a sob.  His hand clenched into a fist- if the Doctor made Rose cry, Jack wouldn’t hesitate to lay one on him, even if it would mean being tossed out into the middle of a supernova.

“Rose-”

“Why did you bring me here, Doctor?  Why bring me someplace… someplace beautiful and lonely… someplace with the stars and the… are you trying to push me and Jack together, Doctor?  Because I don’t want Jack!  I only want-”

She cut herself off with another near-sob and Jack took a step that went unnoticed by the speakers too wrapped up in each other to listen.  He still had no idea where they were, but he’d find them.

He hurried around the edge of one wave and looked, then around another.  The directions were confusing, but he thought the voices must have been coming from his left.

It took him five minutes, but he did find them.  He’d thought he’d stopped hearing them because he’d moved from the acoustic sweet spot, but the moment he saw them he realized that he’d been wrong.  Rose hadn’t stopped talking to weep, but apparently to be thoroughly and passionately snogged by the Doctor in the cold dark of the ice planet called Woman Wept, under the glittering protection of a wave that would never break.

Shaking his head, Jack returned to the ship.  Maybe, just maybe, this would help incline the Doctor toward allowing him to stick around.


End file.
